Houdini Tops Crysis 2 at Google Insights

Google Insights presents a ton of statistics in a mixed bag. Harry Houdini, the magician, topped Crysis 2, a new video game, in increased number of searches. People searched for "Shoes" more than they did for "iPad". You need to know the rules of the game to make sense of the results.

Why did Houdini rise to the top of increased number of searches? Because before Google honored him in their banner, people had lost interest, or hadn?t even heard of the escape artist who has been dead for almost 100 years. The banner brought him into the spotlight again. If he were a product, we could say it was good marketing.

Google Insights for Search Beta

Google Insights provides the researcher with four sets of filters: Web, Image, News or Product is the first set; Worldwide or by Country is next; 7, 30, 90 days or one year, a specific year, or since 2004, restricts the time period. Categories, the last filter range provides choices from Arts and Humanities to Travel, with Computers, Internet, Telecommunications, and other topics in between.

Results on Google Insights depend on how the user inputs the search item. For example, "3DS" and "Nintendo 3DS" created two separate sets of statistics. Their search activity had increased 150 percent and 140 percent respectively. Does that mean the latest offering from Nintendo increased by a combined 290 percent? That its popularity was running rampant? Probably not. In both cases, users were searching for essentially the same topic.

Under the heading, Rising Searches, in the US the "Viewsonic gTablet" outpaced searches for "Viewsonic g [space] Tablet" by 4,550 percent or more. By a simple slip of the space bar, you get different results. The first rendition being classified as a "Breakout," meaning searches increased by more than 5000 percent over the last comparative time frame, which in this case was one week. Change your parameters and under worldwide searches Viewsonic Tablet is still tagged as a breakout increase, while Viewsonic gTablet went up only 700 percent.

Under the other column heading, Top Searches, iPod and HP led the pack. So searches and increases in number of searches give totally different pictures. Its easy to arrive at incomplete, or completely wrong, conclusions.

With many variables, you can make the statistics say anything you want them to. US Web searches in general, in the Computer Electronics category during the past week shows that searches for "3DS" are up 80 percent although "Nintendo" is in 8th place for top searches.

Try researching statistics for Product, Worldwide, Games, Last seven days. "Crysis 2" is in 10th place in a list of 10, but it is up 120 percent in number of searches over the previous week. So we could say it is in last place, or we could say searches for the game have increased more than 100 percent. Which presentation tells the true story? Both, but it is all in how you slant it. By the way, Xbox was first in top searches with Nintendo, who just released the popular Nintendo 3DS and the currently leading console Wii, sat in 8th place.

Nintendo announced that one-day sales of the next generation Nintendo 3DS were the highest of any Nintendo handheld video gaming system in the company’s history. People may not be searching for it, but they sure are buying it.

Remember, computers are very literal. 4 and 4.0 are two different things. In a similar, garbage in, garbage out, set of statistics, Web searches over the last week for Computer Electronics in the US finds Firefox 4 up 200 percent and Firefox 4.0 up 180 percent. We admit that the March 22 release from Mozilla of the latest version of their Firefox web browser has garnered a lot of interest. We just question if Firefox, with a Gecko 2.0 engine which improves HTML5 support, has aroused around 200 percent in increased searches or almost double that, at a combined 380 percent. By checking out the Firefox website, we found that it has been downloaded almost 47 million times as of this writing, and still counting. Whatever percent the searches have increased, Mozilla probably is more interested in actual users.

More than 120 comments assigns four stars to the ViewSonic gTablet on Amazon. Apparently the increase in searches is justified for a well received product. ViewSonic released their latest gTablet software update last December which was deployed via an automatic Over-the-Air update. The tablet runs on 1GHz nVidia Tegra 2, dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, and sports a 10.1 inch TFT-LCD with LED driver system and 1024×600 resolution display. The Android tablet has a virtual QWERTY keyboard, and if you prefer to chat instead of type, there is a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. As a fashion statement, it only comes in… black.

It?s no wonder Crysis 2, an update of Crysis sans an identifying digit, ranks high in increased searches at Google Insights. The awaited science fiction video game was recently released just ahead of the Nintendo 3DS, on March 22, 2011 in the US and three days later in Europe. The first person shooter game was developed by Crytek and published by Electronic Arts. It is available on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. AOL Shopping shows $59.99 as the usual price. What?s called Buz in the industry will typically draw interested parties to do some searching. Hence, a higher ranking on Insights,until the excitement dies down.